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Sunday, 10 August 2008

Har Gau - Prawn Dumplings

Har Gau is usually on all dim sum menus. It certainly is one of my favourites, and I never thought that I'd be able to recreate them at home. The pastry is quite different to that of the potsticker dumplings. When cooked, the pastry becomes translucent and silky.

When Sunflower posted a recipe for these, I had to give them a go. Off I toddled to Chinatown to pick up some wheat starch and tapoica starch. Unfortunately I went without the recipe written down, and when faced with all the different flours, I got confused and picked up glutinous rice flour instead of the tapoica starch. I didn't have the opportunity to go back; no matter, some improvisation would have to do. As the tapoica starch makes up only 20% of the pastry base, I substituted it with cornflour instead.

In comparison to the potsticker dumplings which used bread flour, this dough was easy to work with. It didn't stick to the work top, and after a super-quick knead it transformed into smooth and silky dough. That's where the easiness ended, though. Once I rolled out the dough balls into discs and stuffed them, they were virtually impossible to fold into pleats without the dough splitting at some point. I'm not sure why this is, perhaps because I used cornflour instead of the tapoica starch? But no matter. I improvised and just pinched the dumplings closed into crescent shapes.